Mass Media and Politics

 Almost a year after George Floyd's death sparked worldwide protests, the man who kneeled on his neck was ultimately convicted of murder and is facing decades in prison. This traumatic cultural moment has raised an important question for young journalists - how do you report on police activity? The question has been raised in light of the initial press release from Minneapolis Police shortly after George Floyd's death. In a statement, the police said Floyd "appeared to be suffering medical distress" and was subsequently transported via ambulance to a hospital where he died "a short time later". At no point in the release was it made clear that Derek Chauvin had placed his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes while he gasped for air and told the officers that he could not breathe. This vague, misleading and wholly incorrect initial statement questions the whole premise of reporting solely on what police "said".  If not for the video, that ...

Fascinating research has emerged that has hinted that widespread misinformation about the coronavirus, especially from conservative leaning outlets, led to a weakened response to the pandemic and potentially more spread than would have occurred without. Since the start of the pandemic, Fox News has certainly had much to say in that regard. Whether it was downplaying the pandemic's severity, opposing mask usage and social distancing protocols, or generally advising that Americans need not worry about COVID-19, the studies that will emerge on the effects of these messages will certainly be interesting. Special attention should be paid to the channel's coverage of Anthony Fauci. Ever since Fauci emerged as a sometimes oppositional voice to that of former President Donald Trump's, he became the target of ferocious conservative criticism. Even today, long after Fauci has been a visible enemy to Donald Trump, Fox News runs negative stories about him regularly.  A quick search of ...

 "Before I took office, I promised I help was the on the way. Just three months in, I'm proud to..." blah blah blah... "Here's the deal: Wall Street didn't build this country..." blah blah blah... Several weeks in Joe Biden's presidency, we have now come to terms with a crucial fact - The President's twitter feed no longer makes news. I don't mean this as a criticism of President Biden. Rather, I simply mean to point out that gone are the days of the news cycle relying so heavily upon the Twitter feed of one man. For nearly four years, political reporters needed only to head to Twitter.com to hunt down their latest story, because the chances were good that Trump had just tweeted it out for them. Now, journalists who became dependent on this method are having to get creative, because as you can see from the sample above, Biden's tweets are simply not newsworthy. They are your typical, professional tweets that we came to know in the Obama y...

 In January, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell story that former President Trump had urged an investigator to "find the fraud" in Georgia in an effort to alter his loss to President Biden in the state. They ran this juicy quote in their headline and stuck it in their lead, only to have to issue an embarrassingly long correction two months later that they had misquoted the former President in their story after an audio tape was released. There are a few points that need to be made in light of this correction. Immediately after it was ran, everybody jumped all over the Post, and they deserve criticism of course. However, before we get into the original mistake, it is important to remember that the criticism needs to be in fact of the original error, and not of the large correction itself. We should be glad that one of the nation's largest newspapers would correct a major aspect of a bombshell story in the first place. A much worse alternative would be if our mainstrea...